From “Murdering Elephants”
The elephant whom we never want to forget is Topsy. We know more about how her life ended than we do about how it began. We can see from her photograph that she was an Asian elephant. Newspaper reports on her death in 1903 claim she was 28. This means she was probably caught in India, Sri Lanka, Indochina or Indonesia in the mid 1870s. Then, baby elephants were captured by shooting the mother. Hunters used muzzle-loading, powder-and-lead ball firearms. Multiple shots – sometimes as many as 50 – were needed to make a kill. Elephants rarely died quickly and never without pain and suffering. Hunters and the hunted symbolized the British Empire and the emerging economic power of the United States. The heroic exploits of so-called great white hunters and the dramatic accounts of how they hunted and killed wildlife were propaganda that justified the empire. “Trophy animals” symbolized the power and control the U.K. and U.S. had over nation states and their native peoples as well as their land and animals.
